How Vika Boutique earned $40,000+ in 12 months of going mobile!

Founded in 2013, Vika Boutique is an online store that designs, manufactures and sells ethnic Indian wear and lifestyle products. It was started by Vidhya Pathy, a woman entrepreneur from Bangalore and her store is popular among women all over the world.

However, Vidhya didn’t always intend to be an entrepreneur. A computer science graduate, Vidhya studied Fashion Designing from NIFT-TEA in Tamil nadu and started her career by working with Pantaloons Fashion & Retail Limited. She worked there for 5 years until she was pregnant with her son, Karthik.

After Karthik was born, she realised that she could not continue working and decided to start her own business. In 2012, she launched Vika Boutique and started selling directly via Facebook and Whatsapp.

In the next 4 years, her businesses started picking up and she expanded her sales channel by adding Instagram and continued selling via Social Media, building a close-knit community of customers. Her customers had almost become family, as she successfully built a solid audience network of 100,000 customers.

In 2016, while she was successfully operating her business, she felt the need to have her own steady platform that her customers could go-to to buy all things VIKA.

And, she decided to build her own website. Fueled with the idea of building a steady online identity, she skimmed through various website building platforms before choosing on Shopify.

“The sheer simplicity and ease that Shopify brings is what made me choose Shopify. Using Shopify was extremely easy with super simple integrations and that helped me build my own website without the need of hiring a team/outsourcing web development to an agency.” – Vidhya Pathy, Owner, Vika Boutique

The Goal for Vika Boutique

Vidhya single-handedly took care of the website and her Social media channels via which she engaged with her customers. Six months of launching her website, Vidhya realised that she wanted to scale more. She had a roaring audience network of 100,000 customers and Vidhya wanted to engage with them in a more personalised way. Until now, she was using Facebook and Instagram posts along with her website to communicate with her audience.

She knew she needed something more that could help her build a more personal connect with her customers and improve her communication with them.

While browsing through apps on Shopify that help businesses grow, she came across Plobal Apps. One of our features that struck a chord with her business requirements were ‘Push Notifications’. Vidhya realised that a mobile app would be a great additional sales channel for Vika Boutique and she got in touch with our Mobile App Experts.

Key Goals of building an app

Enhance interactivity and deliver personalised communication

Improve rapport with the audience network

Scale faster

The Plobal Apps Effect

Vidhya went through a thorough onboarding session, wherein our Mobile App experts made an account of her business requirements and helped her create her mobile app, all of this in less than a day!

After her mobile app was created, our Customer Happiness Officer, Khadija took over and helped Vidhya set up and edit her app and successfully launched Vika Boutique’s iOS and Android apps on the app stores.

“I was super anxious and had so many questions whirling in my head. However, Khadija was incredible! She was very supportive and answered all of my questions, both big and small; and effortlessly helped me setup my app.” Vidhya Pathy, Owner at Vika Boutique.

“Initially I was skeptical to pay so much for a mobile app, since we were just experimenting with the channel and weren’t quite sure if we’d achieve good ROI. But thankfully, all my inhibitions were put to rest within the first month!” Vidhya, Owner at VIKA Boutique

In about a month, she started seeing a lot of traction via the app. Since she already had an audience base of 100,000 followers, our free Redirectify tool was a huge bonus that successfully helped her promote her app and send qualified leads to the app which increased her app installs and improved customer engagement.

Within the first month, she clocked in a whopping 1k+ app downloads.

The Results

While she was building a steady app user base, Vidhya started using Push Notifications to communicate with her customers, to engage with them further. Within the first week, she saw a 3x spike in traffic that increased her sales by 46%.

With Push Notifications she has been able to identify She was quickly able to identify her loyal customers and reward them further with interesting incentives and loyalty points.

She typically send 2-3 push notifications per week and here’s what she has to say. “Push notifications have helped a lot. I send two – three push notifications every week. I communicate about my new arrivals via push notifications. They’ve been a great communication channel for me to interact with my customers and have helped me strengthen my rapport with my customers.”

Having a mobile app also helped Vika Boutique gain a competitive advantage over its competitors.

“Most of my competitors have a mobile app and this building a mobile app has helped my customers get direct access to my store right from their phone without the need to searching for my store on the web.” – Vidhya Pathy